Thursday, December 1, 2016

Break Bound Train (A poem of College Misery)

Break Bound TrainHere in the flat country, we get by on grits
and long nights with red pens,
staggering towards the end of things,
and something between death and resurrection
pulls you onward day by day:
a slow moving train going to a place you bought a ticket to
but don't yet believe in.

It might be Oz or Narnia or
(most likely) Winter Break,
But for now, all you see is flat land and trees
outside windows clouded with a thousand dusty days
and dew streaks tracing snail tracks in waves.
"The windows need to be cleaned,"
you think to yourself. You know you
won't be the one to do it.

Your hands are for bleeding.

Your fingers hemorrhage ink on paper;
the conductor collects it every few days.
When the coal ran out, it seemed like the best idea we had.
You don't know where they get these papers;
you are sure you already covered this.
The bleeding red is reflexive at this point.
You unfriend your college roommate
because she still butchers semicolons;
your fingers never stopped aching around her.

There is research, PUBLISHED RESEARCH (albeit I believe about school aged children - I'm too depressed by the whole tell-me-what-colour-to-use bureaucracy to look it up right now, but I have seen a copy sometime), which shows that students get a more negative impression and are more discouraged by a comment written in red ink than by the same comment in another colour.

We're a research-led institution, don't you know (which is presumably why we still put SO much weight on student evals of teaching, given all the published evidence of how problematic those are).

==Grumpy Academic==

Oh, and like Ben below, this semester I have invested in a bright orange glitter gel ink pen for writing comments. It's not against the rules and it gives me a little flicker of enjoyment among the gloom...

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.